Pain in chronic disease conditions including osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, muscle spasticity, and cancer is a major socioeconomic burden, for which few effective treatments are available.
Current chronic pain therapies such as opioids are mostly ineffective or have major off-target effects such as addictiveness due to action on other neuronal subtypes.
Nociceptor sensory neurons mediate the detection of harmful/injurious stimuli, and their aberrant activation produces chronic pain. These neurons are dysregulated in muscle spasticity that may contribute to overactive sensori-motor reflexes, and also innervate joints affected in osteoarticular conditions to mediate pain.